Take screenshots you can search.

Screenotate is a screenshot-taking tool which works just
like macOS's screenshot tool – one keyboard shortcut
and drag – and it uses OCR (Optical Character
Recognition) to recognize text in your
screenshots. It's available for macOS and Windows.

Want to hear about feature updates or versions for iOS, Android, and other platforms?

"Wait, where did I see that?"

Screenotate records useful metadata, not just
text. It can get the title of the window, originating
URL, time the screenshot was taken, and more.

Each screenshot is a self-contained HTML file on your
computer, which you can open up in your Web browser or
share with friends.

Never lose a screenshot again.

Using Screenotate's menu pane, look at recent screenshots and quickly search your past screenshots. You can even drag and drop images directly from here into a chat with someone!

Click a screenshot to open it up in your browser, or right-click to reveal the screenshot file in Finder.

Your computer, not the cloud.

Unlike many notetaking, screenshot, and OCR services,
Screenotate is a desktop app, not a cloud service. The
OCR engine runs on your computer, not in the cloud. Your screenshot data never leaves your computer, unless you
put your screenshot files on a service like Dropbox or
iCloud yourself.

And as long as you have the HTML files around, you'll always be able to search and view your screenshots, even without Screenotate.

Choose the shortcuts you want.

On macOS, Screenotate can automatically replace the
Apple screenshot function and use the same shortcuts,
Shift-Command-4 and Control-Shift-Command-4. Or you can
customize its shortcuts yourself. You can also set where
Screenotate should save screenshots.

Notes

Screenotate requires Mac OS X 10.9, Windows 7, or newer.

Windows users: You may receive an error about Screenotate not being "commonly downloaded": right-click the file in browser Downloads and click "Run Anyway" or "Keep." If you get a separate Windows Defender SmartScreen warning when first running, click "More info" and then click "Run anyway." I'm working on signing Screenotate and building reputation to avoid this.

Screenotate currently only supports OCR in English. Let me know if you're interested in multilanguage functionality.

Screenotate uses the modern LSTM-based version 4.0 of Google's
popular Tesseract OCR engine, but it isn't perfect. In
particular, it might not work as well on non-Retina
(lower-DPI) displays.

At the moment, Screenotate can find and store the URL for
screenshots from Chrome and macOS Safari, but not Firefox or
other browsers.

Though Screenotate detects the correct window title
for any window (active or inactive), its URL detection is
not as solid: if you take a screenshot from any
browser window, it will capture the URL of
the frontmost window of that browser.